Goodale North Trail

During the research a question was posed that deserves consideration. Could Goodale have already known about the Brownlee Ferry being built on the Snake River? How would he have imagined that the train was going to get across the river if he did not know about the ferry ahead of time? Fording the Snake River was probably impossible! We do know that scouts were sent out and John Brownlee came to the Cambridge Valley camp to ask them to build the road. And for sure by then the emigrant miners would have known about the ferry crossing. There is good […]

With the above facts we can begin to better understand the importance of the route that was soon opened directly north of Emmett, in connecting the whole Goodale Cutoff: It soon spliced the Goodale routes together in their middle. The first 203 miles from Fort Hall to Ditto Creek, Elmore County, and the trail north from Boise was by this variant connected to the Powder River, OR. The new route provided a much more useable trail to the meeting with the Oregon Trail. A great deal of traffic continued to pass both ways on the Goodale North for several years,

Three Goodale Routes In The Payette Valley Jim McGill (Update 01-09-05) Attached below is a map of the Emmett to north and NW, with the three routes that can correctly be considered part of the Goodale Cutoff through that area. In the identification of the main Oregon Trail and California Trail, and other alternates, variants and related routes, historians have related all the acceptable secondary routes that made ways for emigrant traffic to reach their destinations to the originals, with names of the route system or with the names of the leaders that discovered the related routes. In this case,

Tim Goodale’s Boise River Crossing Jim McGill (Update 01-03-05) As research continued on the information about the Goodale North route of the 1862 Goodale Wagon Train, from Boise to the Brownlee Ferry on the Snake River, it soon became apparent that there existed some information that might be interpreted to demonstrate that Tim Goodale did not cross the Boise River near the later Boise and proceed NW from near present Eagle, ID, to the area of Emmett. That the Goodale Train did travel from the Boise area to near the present Emmett is one fact that historians have been maintaining